Jan’s Loony Love Life—Crepes and Crazies

Well … I had an excuse for my rattled state of mind. There was a full moon over Long Island, and everybody was acting a little nuts.

Or maybe it wasn’t everybody, just me feeling crazy, because my ex-husband, Jeffrey Quackenbush—he who ran off with the woman next door almost three years ago and whom I divorced in absentia six months later—Jeffrey was back in town.

What I was arguing about now (with my friends at my café) was the Beach Haven Town end-of-summer Beach Bash that was going to be held at Main Beach, with a dance band and refreshments inside an enormous tent. It was a fund-raising event to support the Town kids’ recreation programs, and it would be widely attended—by practically everybody I knew. Which was a lot of people, because I have met so many residents of Beach Haven since I opened my café nearly a year and a half ago.

My ex-father-in-law had phoned me a few days earlier to tell me about the call he got from Jeffrey in Arkansas. Mr. Quackenbush wanted to alert me that Jeffrey was going to arrive in Beach Haven Wednesday, which was yesterday. And just to rock my boat even harder, Mr. Quackenbush said Jeffrey was bringing Sheba Grubb with him. Sheba is the woman he’s been living with in Hot Springs. She is actually the third woman he’s been with since he ran off with our neighbor. Now he’s bringing Sheba home to meet his parents, his dad told me. And then Mr. Q. had one more zinger for me. When he told Jeffrey about the town end-of-summer party coming up Saturday, Jeffrey said, “Great! Sheba loves a party!”

So now, my best friend, Tiny Tucker, was standing in front of the pick-up counter, hands on hips, feet planted belligerently, pleading with my chef, Hank Rogers, who was looking helpless and befuddled back in the cooking area.

“Will you talk to her?” Tiny demanded.

“Who, me?” Hank said.

“Yes, you. You have to talk her into going.”

“I’mnot going,” I repeated. “I am not going to that party where the whole town will be there and be all by myself and Jeffrey there with Sheba. It would be humiliating.”

“You listen to me, Jan Duffy,” Tiny said. “You cannot let yourself be intimidated by Jeffrey Quackenbush. You have to walk in there with your chin up and show everybody you don’t care. Besides, you don’t have to go by yourself. You can go with Hank and me.”

“That’s even worse,” I wailed, “being a third wheel tagging along with my friend and her boyfriend? Please!”

“Brad would take you. You know he would. That would frost old Jeffrey, to see you coming in with a stud like Brad Goode.”

Brad Goode was the super-sexy Deputy Chief of the Beach Haven Fire Department. Gossip among Beach Haven women was that if Brad took you to bed, you would have the premier sexual experience of your life. I could have confirmed that, if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. After all, I had only slept with Brad on one occasion—a night when I was on the outs with Andy Hudson, the knockout-handsome, successful lawyer and all-around sweetie I’d been dating.

Since that night with Brad, Andy and I had made up and promised to be exclusive with each other. It would have been easier if I weren’t still having erotic dreams about Brad and if Brad didn’t turn my insides to hot goo with a sexy smile or an eyebrow twitch just about every time I ran into him.

“You know I wouldn’t go with Brad Goode,” I told Tiny, who knew the whole story. “Andy is in Chicago, and he won’t be back till Monday.”

“You promised Andy you wouldn’t sleep with anybody else. You didn’t promise you wouldn’t go to a party with anybody else.”

I gave Tiny my most withering don’t-be-stupid look. “First of all, if I even talk to Brad, Andy gets upset. And second, if I went out with Brad, you know perfectly well what it would lead to.”

“Don’t you have any will power?” Tiny challenged me. “Can’t you simply tell Brad ‘No, I won’t go to your apartment and sleep with you again’?”

“No,” I said. “And you can just forget the whole thing. I’m not going to that party. Period.”

It wouldn’t have mattered, going to the town party by myself, or with Tiny and Hank, if it weren’t for Jeffrey. The problem was, in spite of what he did to me, I still had feelings for Jeffrey.

Yeah, I know it’s dumb. But go tell that to my heart. My heart can hardly make up its mind between Andy and Brad, and my heart hasn’t stopped caring about Jeffrey, either.

Now, my sweet Andy was out of town, Brad (the serpent in my Garden of Eden, temptation personified) was in town, and Jeffrey (with his new honey) was also in town.

So maybe it wasn’t the full moon that was making me crazy. Maybe it was the circumstances.

Maybe, under these circumstances, crazy was the only sane thing to be.

Chapter 2. Sleeping with Andy

Oh, what can I say about sleeping with Andy? Andy Hudson, my gorgeous, sweetest-guy-in-the world boyfriend. Last Sunday night would be an example—well not a totally fair example, because something extraordinary happened while we were making love. But I’ll get to that.

Andy took me to the Red Baron for our Sunday evening dinner and, when we came out to get into Andy’s Porsche, we noticed it was really dark. In the summer here on Long Island it didn’t get dark until almost 9:00. Now it wasn’t quite 8:00, but thunderclouds were darkening the sky.

It had not started to rain by the time we got to my house. We glanced at the sky as we got out of the Porsche and saw pink streaks to the west.

“Looks like it might pass us by,” Andy commented.

We went inside and up the stairs to my bedroom and peeled everything off as fast as we could. We were eager for love making tonight. Well, we were always eager for love making, but especially on a night like this when Andy was going to be gone for a while. Andy occasionally worked with the Wiznewski law firm in Chicago when one of their mutual clients had legal business in that city as well as on Long Island. Andy was going to catch a flight to Chicago from Islip Monday morning and would work at the Wiznewski offices all week.

We did not mention to each other that a few months earlier Andy, in a Chicago hotel room, had slept with the secretary to the big cheese at Wiznewski. His confessing it to me had caused me to flounce out of his house in a royal snit that didn’t end till I spent a night with Brad Goode — a man reputed (correctly, I found out) to provide a premier sexual experience if you happened ever to wind up in his bed—or his living room or anywhere else in his apartment. So afterward I felt honor-bound to tell Andy I had slept with Brad, which sent Andy into a tailspin.

We had patched it up between us, Andy and I, and agreed to be exclusive with each other—no more either of us sleeping with somebody else. We didn’t say how long we intended for this exclusive arrangement to last. We didn’t say what it might ever lead to. The words “I love you” had not passed between us. But for now we were together and passionate and happy. We knew we were going to miss each other like crazy all week.

Oh, but I’ve wandered off my topic. I promised to tell what it’s like to sleep with Andy, didn’t I? Well, I’ll start with Andy peeling off his clothes.

As everybody in Beach Haven knows, Andy looks great in his clothes. He’s tall and slender and seems to never look rumpled. In a business suit or jeans and a tee, Andy is always tidy and groomed and elegant.

OK—so much for Andy with his clothes on. The real treat is Andy with his clothes off, a treat that right now belongs to me and me alone.

I think the key to the all-out wonderfulness of Andy’s naked body is his heritage. His father, Johnny Hudson (a commercial fisherman who died in a tragic accident at sea when Andy was only twelve), was one of five Hudson brothers, who were all … well … huge—well over six feet, well over two hundred pounds.

So Andy could have inherited that overpowering Hudson physique, but Andy had also inherited genes from his Bosnian mother, Jasna. (She had met and married Andy’s father when he was a Marine stationed near Stuttgart, where she had been a student.) Andy’s Bosnian relatives, the Terzićs, tended to be average in height and slender.

In my opinion, Andy had inherited the best traits of both sides of his family. He was tall but not towering — six-foot-two, which made him exactly tall enough to rest his chin on top of my head and let me nuzzle my face into the angle of his shoulder. He was lithe, but not thin. Within his long, elegant body, he packed a good deal of the Hudson brothers’ muscularity and strength. Dressed, Andy could look greyhound sleek. Naked, he was Rottweiler sturdy, radiating a sheer physical power his stylish clothing masked.

And he wasn’t shy about channeling that power into all-night bouts of heart-melting, head-spinning, belly-spasming, toe-curling love making that—instead of leaving me exhausted the following day—would send me flying through the following 24 hours, feet barely touching the floor, brimming with energy.

We made each other very, very happy in bed.

Oh dear, I almost forgot to tell you about what happened Sunday night after we hurried home to get ahead of the storm—and then concluded the storm wasn’t going to happen after all. Well, we were wrong about that. Unbeknownst to us, while we were lost in our love making, the storm swept back over the south shore. Andy had brought me to the very verge of ecstasy when three things happened simultaneously. A huge flash of lightning strobe-lighted the interior of my bedroom, a deafening clap of thunder gave the room and the bed a violent shake, and Andy entered me with a powerful thrust that lifted me right off the mattress and triggered the most violent and prolonged orgasm I had ever had … or ever thought I could have. Andy himself went off like a rocket, and we were screaming and laughing and convulsing all at the same time. It was almost as if we had been electrocuted … in a very wonderful way.

Whoo!

So now you know why I was missing Andy so dreadfully while he was in Chicago … and Jeffrey was back in town.

Admittedly, most of my nervousness that week was because I knew that, one way or another, I was going to see Jeffrey again after three years—Jeffrey, who had been my first sex partner, and my only sex partner from age 15 to age 26—those prime, juicy years—and while Jeffrey had nowhere near the erotic talent Brad or Andy possessed—was often a little clumsy and selfish, satisfying himself without worrying too much about me—Jeffrey had been my first lover and my only husband … and I still loved him.